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In Legislature, a taste of reform whets voters' appetite for more
In Legislature, a taste of reform whets voters' appetite for more :Thursday, January 04, 2007, by Ruth Ann Dailey, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Heading into the New Year's holiday, Pennsylvania voters watching the last-minute shenanigans in Harrisburg wouldn't have known whether to laugh or cry. A representative sold out his party? Voters were threatened with either one let-'em-eat-cake power-broker or the other? Was this really a New Year? It was sounding a lot like the old one, and the one before that, and the one before that ... until news of what could be a plus for the commonwealth broke on Tuesday. We the people have such a string of successes now, counting from our state's nadir in July 2005, that we can almost enjoy the antics of our surviving shameless wheeler-dealers. Almost. Rep. Tom Caltagirone, of Bucks County, enraged his fellow Democrats when he announced Saturday that he would vote for Republican John Perzel to remain Speaker of the House, negating his own party's one-seat advantage. His "reprehensible," "selfish" act of "political treason," fumed state Democratic Party Chairman T.J. Rooney in a weekend news release, "thwarts the will of the voters" and is "a slap in the face to his constituents and all Democrats throughout Pennsylvania." This is a slap in the face? Where was the purple-prosed Mr. Rooney during the payjacking? Oh right -- he still supports that maneuver but decided to retire from the House rather than risk re-election. Mr. Caltagirone supported the pay raise but later repented, voted to repeal it and returned what he'd received. The man whose speakership his party-hopping vote was meant to deny, House Minority Leader Bill DeWeese, actually stripped committee chairmanships from Democrats with the nerve to vote against the pay raise. It's this kind of brass-knuckled brokering that Mr. Caltagirone's slicker deal-making was intended to rebuke, or so it would seem, now that he's got religion -- the religion of reform. The Democratic leadership frantically spun a different tale. "Caltagirone sold out to an ineffective and scandal-ridden Republican Party that was handed enormous losses as a result of unprecedented arrogance and 12 years of unchecked power," wrote Mr. Rooney in his call for Democrats to protest Mr. Caltagirone's decision. "On Nov. 7, the voters of Pennsylvania sent a clear message. They cast 200,000 more votes for Democrats than Republicans on Election Day." Reading his bilious bulletin, you'd think nothing of significance had happened in the prior 18 months. Quite a bit did, however, and the best thing about this dramatic contest for House Speaker is that it forces us voters to revisit what we accomplished. Within months of the July 2005 pay heist, we'd pressured many of our representatives to return the money and repeal the measure. We turned a sitting judge out of office, and far more politicians than usual thought it wise to retire. When we split up as party members to vote in the May 2006 primaries, however, we fared very differently. Republicans purged their pay grabbers in greater numbers than the Democrats did, getting rid of all their highest-ranking leaders except Philly's Mr. Perzel and removing the protection of incumbency from previously "safe" seats. That is, the Republican Party was "handed enormous losses" because of the rank-and-file's idealism. And it took Republican votes in the general election to finally defeat the state's last unrepentant payjacker, Democrat Mike Veon. It's a terrible shame that Mr. DeWeese and Mr. Perzel survived the voters' wrath, like cockroaches after a nuclear blast. As the debris settles, it may yet prove to be a shame that these two played so great a role in the contest for Speaker of the House. The surprise winner of Tuesday's contest for speaker was Republican Dennis O'Brien, a compromise choice engineered by Mr. DeWeese to deny Mr. Perzel the last-minute victory he thought he'd engineered with Mr. Caltagirone. But will this "compromise candidate" as speaker deliver the reforms we've been demanding for the last 18 months? Since the reformed professionals still outnumber the professed reformers in Harrisburg, the best way for us voters to keep our eyes on the prize of political change is to ask ourselves the question that's never far from our politicos' minds: What's in it for us? As the drama unfolded over the weekend, the old pros desperate to hang onto their power started to throw us a few crumbs of reform. It's not much but it's something. Perhaps the crumbs will whet our appetite for the whole loaf. category:news coverage